


Still Worth Saving

by Dancing_Phalangess



Category: Casualty (TV)
Genre: because dogs, i'll even bring in dervla, more than once, sam returns and we actually get some backstory, she speaks to dylan, some interations with other people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:06:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancing_Phalangess/pseuds/Dancing_Phalangess
Summary: A re-write of Sam's return to Holby, because there's so much left to explore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> here we go gang, chapter one. I’m so out of practise writing anything longer than 1k but let’s see how this goes. This whole thing is pretty much my denial stage, in my head this is how the whole year went because I was so excited for Sam’s return now I wish she had never come back. 
> 
> * disclaimer- I can’t entirely remember the exact timeline of things so if it’s a bit skewy then just remember that time is a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.

1

She can barely believe she’s back here again. It feels like she’s been thrown right back four years ago, but worse, because it’s not green scrubs she wears anymore. She tells Josh she wants a transfer but he doesn’t listen and she doesn’t push it again. Maybe there’s part of her that wants to stay. She never thought she would be back, not after Tom; not after they left for another life in another city. Only here she is, back at the hospital she once loved so much. 

~*~

Dylan stares at her like she’s zapped from another planet. But he doesn’t have a lot of time to take her in before a kidnapping and an illegal surgery are thrust upon him. He blinks, stumbles, but then rights himself. His eyes flicker to her hand, to what’s not there and they get a fraction wider, but he doesn’t say a word.  
For a while after that there’s not a world outside of them. It’s that deserted stretch of road and the patient. It almost feels like nothing’s changed between them at all since he was her mentor and she was still so eager and wide eyed. Then, she believed she could be a good doctor. She believed there was no such thing as hopeless. 

~*~

“I told Connie it was me.” 

She blinks at him, wondering if she heard him wrong, or he’s talking about something else entirely, but he can barely hold her gaze. Warmth spreads through her veins and she smiles, for what feels like the first time in decades. It’s one that puts crinkles at the corners of her eyes.  
When she hugs him he doesn’t hug her back, but he doesn’t pull away either and just for a moment she lets herself linger. It feels like finally mooring a ship that’s battled through a raging storm. 

~*~

“Let me guess, you cheated?” 

She tilts her head, glares at him, but doesn’t deny it. It’s an easy lie, she’s done it before. Maybe that’s why Dylan glares when he sees her pushing a stretcher down the corridor, when she relays the vitals and the patient details and dares to to look at him while she does it.  
She still doesn’t correct him.

~*~

There’s sauce all over her and she only remembers when she’s pulled out everything in her locker that she’s wearing her spare top. She hesitates to take Iain’s - being too close to him is the reason she smells of curry- but she hasn’t let anyone like Lily dictate what she does before (or she has, but she isn’t going to be that person anymore. She can’t) so she strips off her own and pulls on his. 

For a second she’s hit by the overwhelming scent of him, the same one that dragged her through endless dark nights with dust in their eyes and screams in their ears. For a second, she wraps her arms around herself and holds onto it. She thinks maybe it was the last time she really felt safe. 

~*~

“Do you want to grab some dinner after work? Catch up properly?” She leans against the desk so she won’t hop from foot to foot like a twelve year old. She feels like she did when she asked out Jake Sullivan when she was sixteen. Cool, popular Jake who had almost every girl and even some boys falling at his feet. She asked him because he was older, because he had a car and could drive her out of there. 

Dylan barely looks at her, and that’s almost worse than his rejection. He can’t even just say no, he has to humiliate her, draw it out. She should be used to it by now but it still feels like he’s swung a steel boot into her chest. 

But maybe she can’t blame him entirely. She’s the one who chose Tom. 

Iain pounces as soon as he’s gone looking like a child with a bike shaped package at Christmas. Sam jabs her elbow into his ribs, but she’s almost glad he’s there to mock her. In the army, they did nothing but and it makes things feel almost normal. Working side by side with him again is the one good thing about not being a doctor anymore.  
So she lets him buy her a ‘pity coffee’ from the kiosk and throws a plastic spoon at him when he repeats that stupid quote like a track on repeat. 

~*~

She flies, the wind snapping up her hair and throwing it like a streamer behind her. She closes her eyes, her fingers loosen on the handlebars but then something screeches. Her eyes open and with wind stinging tears into them she sees the lorry she’s about to crash into. She swings the handlebars around, hurling instead into the trees beside her. It’s going much to fast and it blurs past, horn blaring, but the bike is still flying. 

Until it’s not but she still is. Her body hits the ground with a thump that shakes her bones; her head cracks against a fallen log. The world disappears, shimmering under a veil. She closes her eyes and curls a little tighter, waiting for it to come back again. 

When it settles, she sits up and leans against the log. Her heart it still thumping hard and fast enough to make her stomach twist and she feels shaky, like she hasn’t eaten all day. She tilts her head up to the sky. There’s no sun, but a breeze strokes her face. Finally, she’s alive. 

~*~

Iain bounds up behind her in the bay, throwing his arm around her shoulders. She throws him off so quickly he stumbles. “Don’t!” 

“Woah, all right. Who pissed in your cornflakes?” 

Sam rolls her eyes. Normally, this is what she needs. Iain, treating her like one of the blokes, throwing light insults and nudging her when they should be listening to the teacher, but right now he’s standing more than six feet away and she still can’t shake the weight of him from her shoulders. 

Now he’s looking at her like she’s a bleeding patient. “You all right?” 

“I’m fine. I just came off my bike yesterday and having a huge oaf pouncing on me hasn’t done wonders.” 

Iain comes closer. “You shouldn’t be here if you’re injured. Let’s have a look, eh?” He reaches for her but she steps away from him. His arm may as well be made of iron. 

“I’m fine.” She doesn’t bother to keep the bite out of her voice. She aches all over, but it has nothing to do with why she doesn’t want him touching her and the more he insists the more her fingers twitch to lash out. He doesn’t try and get any closer, but he is looking at her like he’s debating whether to call the psych team.  
She remembers nights of falling apart in his arms, something tearing so deep inside of her she knew she would never reach it again to fix it. She let him hold her then because he was so much more than a life jacket in a stormy sea. He was a stone house on an island with iron doors and a fire that cracked and glowed. He was a friend waiting in there with a thick blanket that felt like warm snow melting against her skin and several inches of whiskey to drown the things that were living inside her. (But Dylan had been all of those things on dry land). 

“Sam-” But then her radio crackles to life and whatever he had been going to say is lost to the next emergency. 

~*~

Wind whips her hair around her face as she wanders down the dock, her eyes scrunched against it. Despite the ice in the air, a glow of warmth seeps through her chest at the sight of his boat, like a hand warmed in a fire pressed against her heart. It cools a little the closer she gets; her welcome is going to be something a little less. 

She raps on the door before she can change her mind and immediately there’s a crash from inside, a scuffle. Then silence. She frowns to herself and knocks again. That time there’s no sound at all, not even of Dervla barking or scratching at the door. She tries the door but it refuses to let her in. The windows are blocked by the curtains.  
Obviously Dylan’s out, but there’s someone in there and a burglar wouldn’t lock the door behind them again. So she gives knocking one last try and presses her ear right against the door, but there’s only the sound of water smacking the side of the boat. 

~*~

The woman is curled at the bottom of the stairs; her husband grasps her hand tightly. She’s whimpering. “All right, darling? My name’s Iain, I’m a paramedic. Can you tell me your name?”

“Lara,” her husband butts in. 

Iain barely gives him a glance. “I’m going to need her to answer thanks mate. Can you tell me what happened, Lara?” 

There’s a pause. Her husband squeezes her hand. “I fell. Down the stairs.” 

“And how did that happen, did you trip? Feel light headed?” 

“Tripped.” 

Sam glances to the top of the stairs. They’re spotless. Free of clutter or even a spec of dust. 

Iain asks her some more questions about allergies and medications and past health, even what she had for breakfast. Lara is barely looking at him. Her gaze is fixed on Sam. 

~*~

At the hospital, she hovers. She hands the patient over to Dylan and Bea, reeling off stats and secondary surveys but there’s something she’s not saying. Something she can’t say because all she has is a clean carpet and a husband who holds his wife’s hand. 

She hovers until Dylan says “Is that all?” But not as harshly as she knows he can speak to her. 

“I think the husband is abusing her.”

That gets the raised eyebrow it deserves. “Do you have a reason for this accusation?” 

She doesn’t, not really. “Just keep an eye on it. Please, Dylan?” 

He sighs. Rolls his eyes. But he doesn’t say no before he walks away. 

~*~

She leaves the shop with her head down, holding the door open for the person approaching without looking at them. Until they stop and spin around to walk away again. She looks up in time to see Dylan almost jogging away, in time to catch up with him and hit him gently with her shopping. “If I wasn’t so used to you seeing me and bolting I’d be offended.”

“You might be shocked to learn not everything’s about you, Samantha.”

She’s so used to this too, so it makes no sense when tears sting her eyes. She drops her head so he won’t see them, her hair swinging around her face. (For god’s sake, at least pretend you want to be here). 

He sighs. “I wasn’t running from you. I just changed my mind.” His voice is a little softer, his version of an apology. She closes her eyes, waiting for the tears to disappear. 

“If it’s something to eat you’re after my cooking skills have expanded. I can do cheese on toast.” It’s an empty gesture he’s going to refuse, but she doesn’t want him to know that she’s become someone who will crumble at a few mean words. (You think anyone’s going to hire you looking like that?). “You can bring Dervla,” she added, taking away his fail safe excuse.

“She’ll need a walk.” 

“I live near the park.” 

“Fine. I’ll go and pick her up.”

“I’ll get the cheese on toast going.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far so good, two whole chapters (and I've even started on the third). There's a chance this will end up more than five.

She barely spends any time in her flat. It’s show home empty with none of the promise. Someone else has already been in there and stained the walls with food and the door frame with a brown smear of blood. The walls are just a fraction paler in rectangles where pictures used to hang but she hasn’t filled them with any of her own. There’s no one she wants to put there (no one she can put there). The few scattered possessions she’s managed to keep after three stints in a war zone and two failed marriages barely fill up one cupboard. All the furniture came with the lease.

Dervla bounds around it like she’s found her very own Disneyland. First she’d jumped on Sam, leaping up to push her with her front paws before running a few circles around her and jumping up again until Sam had knelt down and given her the fuss she deserved.

Now there’s cheese on toast bubbling under the grill and an excited dog running between their feet, but she still can’t think of a single thing to say to her ex-husband. They can’t talk about the things wedged between them-like the lack of a ring on her hand or the fact that she’s back here again, and so is he, even after they both left the place behind.

“How’s Lara?” Dylan looks blank. “The woman who fell down the stairs?” she prompts.

He shrugs. “She’ll recover.”

“Did you find anything out about her husband?” She tries to make it sound casual, but her heart is slamming against her chest.

“No, Sam. I didn’t get a chance to ask her if her husband actually pushed her.”

“What about her history?”

“I shouldn’t actually share that with you.”

She flinches, but he’s not wrong. She’s not a doctor anymore, anything that happens after she’s handed the patient over in the hospital has nothing to do with her. But she can’t just leave it. Dylan told her she was like a dog with a bone, but even they give that up eventually, when they get hungry for something else.

Dylan sighs. “Yes, she does have a medical history that could suggest abuse, but Dr Monroe said she denied everything and there’s nothing more we can do. We can only help those who want to be helped.”

She nods but it doesn’t mean anything to her. She knows of the lies you’ll tell even yourself.

//

She remembers the boat when they’re eating slightly charred cheese on toast (and for a moment when she had pulled it out of the grill, her heart had stuttered). She thinks about keeping her mouth shut because it’s either nothing or something and if it’s something he won’t talk about it anyway. But she’s never been very good at rules and boundaries.

“So what are you hiding in your boat?” She expects confusion, to be told to mind her own business. She doesn’t expect the flittering look of utter panic.

“What?” he snaps, just a fraction too late.

“I...I went to your boat last week. It sounded like there was someone in there.”

His shoulders droop. “Yes, me.”

“It sounded like someone who didn’t want to be found.”

“Perhaps I saw you through the window.”

It’s childish enough not to sting. Even though she has no doubt he would hide from her, it hadn’t sounded like him. It had sounded like the children scrambling from behind desks in schools littered with bullets and the bodies of their classmates.

~*~

It’s two days before Sam can talk to Lara. If it weren’t for visiting hours, her husband wouldn’t leave her side at all and Lara refuses to say a word against him. There are injuries, ghost lines cracked across her bones, a nose not quite set, the bubbled trace of a burn across her ribcage that she swears was her own clumsiness with the kettle. And if she won’t talk there’s nothing they can do. Dylan’s reminded her of that enough times.

But finally she’s free of him, free of doctors and Sam slips onto the ward. Lara looks up at her, barely blinking. “Can I help you?”

“You can help yourself by telling the truth.”

Lara rolls her eyes. “Really? Because I’ve been telling it all this time and you still won’t leave me alone.”

Sam almost smiles. At least there’s still defiance in there. “Whatever reason you have for staying isn’t good enough. He doesn’t love you, he isn’t going to change, it will happen again and there’s nothing you can do to stop him. The man you knew before all this started wasn’t real. It was just someone he made up to draw you in.”

Lara’s eyes flash and Sam knows she’s gone too far but kind words and gentle encouragement haven’t shaved a centimetre. “Is that what you tell yourself to ease your guilt?”

“What?” Her blood has turned to frost.

“Your husband. Bet he smacked you around pretty good. Maybe gave it to you a bit rough every now and again and you couldn’t hack it so you walked out on him. I’m not you. I love my husband and some failed doctor isn’t going to tell me how to run my marriage or my life.” She turns her head away. Sam opens her mouth, but it’s like the the other woman has reached into her chest and ripped out everything she could find there.

Then a nurse yanks back the curtain and glares at her for being there. “Visiting hours don’t start until 12,” she snaps, but Sam’s already walking away.

~*~

She’s climbing into the ambulance with Iain when Bea Kinsella sprints over, her hair streaming behind her like a flame. She’s in a bright green observer jacket and for a moment it’s like looking at herself from the outside. “Yes?” Sam raises her eyebrows.

“I’m coming with you!” She beams. “If that’s okay. Dr Keogh said-”

“It’s fine,” Sam interrupts, making a mental note to murder Dylan later.

“Brilliant. Thank-you.” Bea gives her another smile, which Sam barely manages to return.

It’s not personal, really it isn’t, but she volunteers to drive so she doesn’t have to talk. Iain rides in the back with Bea, because he’s nice like that; he won’t leave her out of the club. He had been the only on in their squadron who didn’t leave tampons in her bunk until she stopped a man from bleeding out from a blasted limb with a gun pressed against her temple.

It’s a relief when they pull up to the still blazing house. There’s a woman screaming on the lawn and another man the other paramedics that got here before them are working on. The operator had said three casualties. Iain and Bea are climbing out of the back doors before she’s even pulled the breaks.

The screaming woman doesn’t stop,not even when Iain crouches beside her and asks for her name. There’s not a visible mark on her. “I’m going to need you to try and take a breath for me, love.”

The woman draws in a lungful of air and screams again. “Maisie!”

Maisie? Sam scans the front lawn, the street, the huddle of firefighters raging against the flames, the onlookers holding on tightly to their own children. “Is she still in there? Maisie?”

At the sound of her daughter’s name from someone else’s lips, the woman turns around. She nods. “Where?”

“Her-her room.”

“Upstairs?” The woman nods again, incapable of anything beyond that. But it’s all Sam needs.

She runs, grabbing the nearest fireman by the elbow. “There’s someone still in there!”

He doesn’t even turn around. “I know.” He’s yelling above the roar of the flames and the rush of water from the hose, but she still hears the tightness in his voice.

“There’s a crew in there? They’re going to get her out?” It’s almost a plea, but he shakes his head.

“Had to pull them out. Building’s unstable.”

“You can’t just leave her!”

He looks at her at last, the fire reflected in his gaze. “You think it was an easy choice? I send a crew in there and no one comes out alive. There are people who need medical help, if you fancy doing your own job.” He turns away again and Sam wastes no more time. She sprints towards the building, ducking around the firefighters who will try and stop her, someone’s screams bouncing off of her back.

///

The girl’s being dragged out of her arms and with them empty she tumbles. The ground spins towards her; grit digs into her palms. It’s like the smoke is inside her, coiling inside her skull, behind her eyes. She gasps but all she gets is ash. It’s still billowing from the house, settling on her shoulders. She coughs and the smoke shimmers in front of her eyes. The arm holding her up trembles and she sinks towards the ground until someone lifts her gently.

“Here.” Bea presses an oxygen mask into her hand and Sam grasps it gratefully to her face, gulping in clean air. Ash still smolders inside her chest, but she can breathe. Bea has one hand on each shoulder, half holding her up- she tries to look for the little girl but there’s smoke in her eyes and she can’t see anything beyond a faint blur of red and green. Dylan’s going to kill her for this.

“Iain’s got her,” says Bea like she can see what Sam’s eyes are trying to find.

It’s not enough. She wasn’t breathing when she found her, even her hair was smeared black. But Iain’s seen worse- he’s knelt by her side with a boy who was no more than a head and torso, but still awake, still screaming- and they did that with men who yelled in Arabic but waved guns to make their point in a language she and him could understand.

She should be with him now, but when she pushes on her hands and tries to force herself to stand, Bea holds her down. “No, please, just sit down. Let me-”

“I’m fine!” She tries to shrug her off but pain spears through her shoulder and she remembers something falling from the ceiling, knocking her to the crumbling ground. Now she notices there’s blood. She moves it more gingerly and it does what she wants. No lasting damage.

But Bea won’t let her get up and her head is swimming so badly. She sees Iain leaning over Maise, a mask and pump attached to her face and the mother, no longer screaming but barely able to hold herself up. She’s clinging to her daughter’s hand like she can teather her to life.

~*~

Her curtain is yanked back and Dylan strides in, pausing to shut it again before he glares at her.

She raises an eyebrow. “Can I help you?”

“Yes you can actually.” He grabs the pulse oximetry dangling uselessly at the side of the bed and throws it at her. “Put this on.” It’s not a request and when she doesn’t move he seizes her hand and clips it on himself. It beeps steadily.

Sam rolls her eyes. “See, I’m fine.”

“Right. I suppose that’s not your blood?”

She sighs. It’s stopped now, but her shirt is thick with dried blood. It stings constantly, and aches too when she moves it. But she hadn’t let Bea do any more than check her airways before she had pushed away any form of help. They had tried to make her go in her own ambulance, but she climbed in the back of the one she had came in and refused to act the patient. There was still a little girl who couldn’t breathe on her own. So they put her in here, refusing to let her go back out or even home.

Dylan sighs too. “She’s alive. Still intubated, but there’s brain activity and the chest x-ray came back clear. It was utterly idiotic and reckless, but you saved her life.”

Only she’s not awake yet and brain activity doesn’t mean no damage.

“Look, the sooner you let someone treat you, the quicker you can get out of here.”

She closes her eyes. “Fine. Get on with it.”

“Me?”

“You already have the needle in your pocket.”

When she opens her eyes again he’s produced it, along with a vial for her blood and a suture kit. He clears his throat. “You’re going to need to-”

Wincing, she peels her shirt over her head. She feels the wound on her shoulder crack and bleed again. She swallows hard and drops the t-shirt in her lap with slightly shaking hands, feeling sick. She doesn’t look at her ex-husband even though she knows what he’s seeing.

“What happened?” She smiles then. It touches her eyes just a little.

“Just an accident on the bike.” She senses he’s going to say something else, but he just shakes his head.

He gives her a shot of anesthetic before he even cleans away the blood. She had refused any painkillers when Bea had led her through to the cubicle, but now she feels tightness seep from her muscles. Her throat hurts and her eyes sting, but her shoulder is blissfully numb. She sits still while her ex-husband stitches her back together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments give me life because I need validation as much as I need water.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's chapter three. Tbh I'm amazed I got this far, but Sam Nicholls deserved better and I'm gonna try give it to her through my mediocre writing.

A seagull squawks in her ear; she throws a chip to the end of the dock. It flies after it, splattering its faeces on the wood and Sam crumples the empty wrapper and shoves it in her pocket. She can see enough from her vantage point to know that Dylan isn’t alone on his boat. There are shadows moving across the windows, a blurred outline that’s definitely not him. 

She strides along the dock and knocks firmly on the door. It’s there again, that same scrabbling sound along with Dylan hushing whoever’s there. Sam rolls her eyes. Dylan can be great at keeping secrets as long as there’s very little actual evidence to hid; his social awkwardness to blame for both. She tries the door and it opens. 

Dylan stares at her. “Why does no one understand the concept of private property?” 

Behind him is a boy. Maybe eleven, twelve. His eyes are fixed fearfully on Sam. 

“Dylan, who is this?” 

He sighs. “Will you at least shut the door?”

~*~  


Bea slides up to her when she’s trying to have ten minutes of peace and a coffee between call outs. It used to be that she never had a moment off of her feet and it was how she loved it. In some ways it’s like being back in the army: working with Iain again, waiting for the crackling of the radio that will give them their next job, scenes of carnage and horror- but in too many ways it’s not. 

“Hey.” Sam smiles tightly back. “How are you? I mean after-”

“No lasting damage.” She wants to say better than a four year old who has permanent lung damage. 

Bea slides her hands into the pockets of her scrubs. “It was amazing, what you did. Insane, but amazing.” In her awe, for a moment, Sam remembers how it felt to finally be doing something more than picking up the patient and driving them to the real doctors. 

But to Bea, she just shrugs. “Once a soldier.”

“Soldier?” 

“I was an army doctor, along with Iain.”

Bea’s eyes widen, but at least she doesn’t ask what everyone else does when they hear that. 

Did you ever kill anyone?

~*~

“You never did tell me what happened with you and Tom,” says Iain while she’s driving the ambulance. And it’s casual, but there’s something else there too. 

Sam ignores him She ignores her heart, fluttering like a trapped butterfly beating its wings against glass, ignores her breath that hitches in her throat. She ignores them, and watches the road. 

“Oi.” Iain pokes her knee. “Give me a sob story and I might even buy you a drink later.” 

She unglues her teeth, peels the words from her lips. “You got it right. I cheated.” (What else is she going to tell him?) 

“Knew it. Bet he wasn’t as good as me though.” She doesn’t glance at him, but she knows he’s winking at her. Like they’re still in a bunker, crammed onto a bed meant for one and he’s making her feel like she doesn’t have glass in her chest. 

Now, he’s making her feel like it’s a boulder. 

~*~

_He drove them home afterwards with a face carved from marble. Sam sat slightly slouched against the door from the gin._

__

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_“You had fun.” Tom’s voice crackled through the silence like distant thunder, but Sam wasn’t in the mood to blunt the edge in it._

__

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_“I did actually.”_

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_“You made me look like an idiot, draped all over him.”_

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_Her nose wrinkled. “Who?”_

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_“Come on, Sam. I have eyes.” Right then they weren’t on the road._

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_“You mean Jay?” His fists tightened on the wheel._

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_Jay, an old friend she hadn’t seen since she left the army, once almost as important to her as Iain. Dylan hadn’t minded that time he had come to visit on the boat and thrown her into the sea. She didn’t think it was the moment to tell Tom, though. “He’s my lover,” she said instead. “We’re running away to the Caribbean together to open a lemonade bar.”_

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_The silence was worse than his jibes, but she didn’t take hers back. His speed crept up, even though the headlights barely cut through the dark and fog. “Speed,” she warned, but he took it as an invitation._

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_There was nothing else on the road, not yet, but they were going too fast to stop._

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_“Tom, slow down.” The bravery the alcohol had given her crumbled into terror as the engine roared beneath them._

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_He flicked off the headlights, shutting them in darkness._

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~*~

The blanket smells a little like dog but it’s thick and soft (and it smells like him too). He throws up the heat and by the time they reach his boat she’s almost warm again. 

Dervla runs to greet her as soon as she steps inside; she runs in circles around her, yipping when she realises who it is. Sam scratches behind her ears and the dog takes her place at her old co-owner’s feet. Dylan shakes his head. “I explained to her that you wouldn’t be around any more.”

Sam’s eyebrows lift to the ceiling. “You explained the concept of a divorce to a dog?” 

“No. I simply told her you had gone away but that time you wouldn’t be back.” 

“Did you tell her I still loved her very much and none of it was her fault?” 

“If you’re just going to take the mick you can get the bus back to your own house and have Indian alone.” 

She throws up her hands in surrender, but she can actually feel a smile creeping onto her face. It’s been a long time since anything has been easy between them. There had been a few peaceful weeks, after the cave, an almost truce. Then he had dressed up to ask for another go and she had served him with divorce papers. Maybe she deserves his rejection. 

But then he notices her shiver and ushers his dog away so she can sink onto the sofa where there are more blankets. “Tea,” he announces before disappearing into the kitchen. 

//

“He didn’t consent,” Sam tells him ten minutes later with her sleeves pulled her her hands- those wrapped around a mug of tea hot enough to blow clouds of steam into her face. 

“He was...scared. Confused. He just kept begging us not to take it.”

Dylan looks at her , almost softly. “If you hadn’t amputated, what would have happened?”

“He would have died. Maybe his sister too if we couldn’t make her leave him.” 

“Well then,” he says as if that settles it. To him it does. To Dylan it’s always black and white, it is or it isn’t. To her, it’s another layer of guilt. 

~*~

_A woman is rocking her dead child, her fingers brushing his hair as though he can still feel it. She looks up, her eyes locking with Sam’s. په دوزخ کې اوریدل._

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Burn in Hell. 

_She turns and runs, her feet pounding on the hot sand even as she screams at herself to turn back. A sun scorched steering wheel burned her skin as she drove, kicking up dust behind her, but the woman and her child never got any further away. They grew bigger._

__

__

_Her head turns towards the passenger seat. There’s a man sitting there, a gaping hole in his forehead and tears streaming down his cheeks, running paths along the soot on his cheeks. In his fist he holds his inhaler. Silently, he mouths at her. Help me. She fires another hole into his chest._

__

__

_Dylan’s body slumps in the seat, his eyes wide but with the kind of emptiness of a school at midnight. She screams. Tom clamps his hand over her mouth, crushing her nose against her skull. She tries to breathe but it just makes her chest tighter. He pushes her into the bed._

__

__

_“Don’t say his name.”_

__

__

_She squeezes her eyes shut and turns her gaze away from what he’s going to do._

__

__

When she opens them she sees darkness. Shadows cast against the walls and a figure in front of her, dark and small and speaking words she can barely understand. “Wake up, Miss Samantha. Wake up.” 

A dream. Thank god. 

(Except it wasn’t entirely). 

She forces herself to sit up, her limbs stiff and tingling from the way she’s slept (on Dylan’s sofa, apparently). There are thick blankets draped around her and she throws them off, even as she shivers at the sweat cooling on her skin. “Where’s Dylan?” she asks Sanosi, fighting the impulse to reach out and switch on the light. 

“Asleep. You were having a bad dream,” he adds, like she might not have figured it out. 

Her heart is beating so hard she feels sick. Sanosi squints at her through the darkness, his forehead crinkled. “Shall I get Doctor Dylan?”

“No!” Sam says, too quickly. “It’s all right. I’m okay.” 

The boy doesn’t look convinced. 

She switches on the light. “I think we both need a hot chocolate.” Sanosi’s face breaks into a grin. 

She knows her way around the kitchen as if there’s a map drawn into her brain; she even remembers to flick the button twice because it takes Dylan’s ancient cooker a while to wake up. She makes it in the pan, the only real way to do it, melting chocolate into the milk (she still knows where Dylan keeps his stash for his more-frequent-than-he-would-ever-admit cravings). 

Sanosi has a curve of milk foam around his top lip before Sam’s has even cooled enough to drink (she added a little cold milk to his). But there’s still a loud part of her tugging her limbs to move, to get out of there because it’s the middle of the night and she should not be on her ex-husband’s boat making hot chocolate for his stowaway. 

“I have them too,” he says when his hot chocolate is almost gone. “I see the men with guns, and my family.” He doesn’t go on. He doesn’t need to. It’s the same things she sees- children with stumps where their legs used to be and dead women with arms still wrapped around their baby’s corpse. Herself holding the gun. 

“He said you were one of the good ones.” 

A sudden crunch of agony crushes her so tightly she wants to curl in on herself. She hasn’t been good for so long- in too many ways to explain to a child. And she can hardly think of herself as a soldier any longer. 

She doesn’t, can’t, say anything but Sanosi doesn't seem to expect her to. He steals another marshmallow from the bag and she doesn’t say anything about that either, but she does take the bag away after he’s had his sixth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, pls validate me.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to my two readers for taking so long to get this up, and that it's not even that good now that I have. I'm taking part in NaNoWriMo again this year so that's eating my soul and any kind of free time outside of work.

There’s a new paramedic. Bright eyed and eager with the entire manual memorised verbatim. Iain moans that she threw away his kebab and Sam all but throws the DNR at her when they finally find it hidden in an old biscuit tin. 

But later she wonders if it might be better that the lonely old lady who called them out just to have someone to talk to didn’t have to die on her own.

It’s enough to extend the invitation to buy them all drinks that she got on her first day (her first first). Ruby starts to protest that it’s a work night and the body takes, on average, an hour to break down one unit of alcohol, but Sam just stares at her until she blushes, drops her gaze and mumbles something that she takes as a yes. 

~*~

“Dylan, we can’t keep this up forever.” 

“We? He’s my responsibility, Sam and it’s my decision.” 

“So you’re just going to hide him away in here for the rest of his life?”

“Well, no. Obviously not.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”

“I have a friend from the army-”

“If you’re about to say the words ‘immigration officer’.”

“Social worker, actually. Who specialises in refugee children.” 

“No.”

“Sanosi has a good case for staying. He’s a child. He has no family, no one to go back to.” 

“So when they do ship him off, he’ll end up in some orphanage that can’t afford walls.”

“Those really don’t exist outside of cartoons.” 

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s just a meeting. A hypothetical one. We’ll ask all the questions. No one has to be involved but the three of us.” 

“Since when did it become anything to do with you?” 

“Like it or not, Dylan, I’m involved now.”

“You don’t have to be. You’re my ex-wife, Samantha. Please look it up in a dictionary.” 

~*~

There are burning hot needles prickling beneath her skin, the world is rushing around her all at once- too much to watch. Her back slams into the walls, but she doesn’t notice the spark of pain. 

“Sam?” Ruby’s voice, sharp and panicked. 

Please don’t touch me. She doesn’t think she says it out loud. 

“There’s a chair right here, okay? Just sit down and I’ll be right back.” She hears the door open then close again and sinks into the chair. She buries her head in her hands and   
waits to be able to breathe again. 

A mask lands in her lap. She picks it up and holds it to her mouth, gulping in air- hardly caring that it means someone else is there, watching this. Finally, when she can feel something other than the burning needles, she notices the tears on her face. She keeps her head in her hands, drained enough to sink right to the floor and curl up there. 

Ruby dithers in front of her. “Do you want me to get anyone?”

Sam thinks of Dylan, then shakes her head. “I’m okay,” she lies. 

~*~

They tell her what she thought they would; they won’t throw out a child with nowhere else to go. Whoever smuggled him in can’t be promised the same immunity, but they’ve been friends long enough so he doesn’t ask any more questions. He warns, though, that he can’t guarantee anything. She knows how it is- she’s fought a war based on terrible decisions and humanity’s lack of their own title trait. 

~*~

Iain slams the ambulance door but doesn’t start it. “You gonna tell me about these panic attacks?”

She watches another ambulance back into the bay. “I can add big mouth to Ruby’s growing list of attributes.” 

“She was worried about you. So am I. Come on, Sam, it’s me.” 

He means the time he found her hunched in the corner of the privy with a growing stain on her trousers, lying flat and still side by side as bullets ripped through the air around them, dragging the bodies of their friends over the corpses of strangers so their families would have something to bury. He means nights spent under the dim glow of a single bulb, curled around each other. 

But somehow, she can’t tell him this. “We have an emergency to attend.” 

“You’ve gotta talk to someone, Sam.” 

She tells him to drive. 

~*~

She downs a glass of whiskey before she takes a Thai to Dylan’s boat. He’ll smell it on her breath, even if she sucks an entire packet of polos, because there’s no hiding drinking from an alcoholic. It doesn’t stop her taking another gulp. 

He looks at her for a second longer before he lets her inside. She just nods when he offers her tea and stands very still- a habit she’s always had when she’s nervous. 

Dylan pushes a mug into her hands. “What’s the matter?” 

It earns him a stare. He’s always preferred to ignore the dinosaur in the room. Or miss it altogether. “You’ve been different ever since you came back. Even I’ve noticed.” 

She wants to be more drunk for this. “I didn’t cheat on Tom.” It’s not what she means to blurt out and it gets the reaction from Dylan it deserves.

“Wonderful. It was just me you couldn’t remain faithful to.” 

It’s not too late to walk out, but Sanosi is with David and if she doesn’t do it now she’ll never find the courage again. 

So she tells him about her phone. That he would go through it in front of her, even added a GPS app so he could track where she was when she wasn't with him. She tells him that he would accuse her of sleeping with almost any man she glanced at, but it was worse when he didn't say anything at all because then she knew his jealousy was simmering to become something bigger. She tells him about the car, how she thought he was going to smash it into a wall, or another car; how he pulled it to a stop in the middle of a road with not street lights and left her there without the keys until dawn. 

Even as she’s speaking she wishes she wasn’t. It all sounds so pathetic. 

Dylan doesn’t say anything, but she knows he’s thinking: Why did you let him? 

(Because he made me fall in love with him first. Then he crushed the life out of me so slowly that my the time I noticed there was nothing left inside me to fight with). 

But he’s still saying nothing and she won’t stand and listen to the silence. 

His voice stops her when she starts to walk away. “Did he ever hurt you?”

He hurt her in so many ways she can’t even begin to find the pieces of herself again, but she knows that’s not what he’s asking. “He never hit me.” That, technically, is the truth. 

“Where is he now?”

She shrugs. “Last time I saw him was almost a year ago when I told him I was leaving.” 

“Which was?”

“Why?” She keeps her head bowed towards the floor. 

“I want to send him a fruit basket. Why do you think?”

She turns to look at him at last. “I don’t need you to beat up the scary man for me, Dylan.” 

“He deserves a lot worse than that.”

And she hasn’t even told him the worst of it. Despite everything she feels a warm tinge in her chest. He’s always been protective of her- not that she ever needed it. It was one of the things she missed most when they fell apart. Someone who cared. Now, though, she needs him to stop. She doesn’t deserve his defence. 

She also doesn’t stop him when he takes her hand and tugs him towards her, wrapping her in a tight hug. He's always been her safe harbour. 

~*~

Bea corners her as she’s finished handing over a patient and asks her out. With Ruby and Alicia too. She goes red as she says it though, as if Sam might have thought it was something else. Immediately, she goes to say no. Then thinks about the other offer she has (sitting alone in her empty flat with a measure of scotch to keep Tom’s voice out of her head). She accepts. A smile breaks over Bea’s face, like it matters. Like she really wants her there. 

~*~

The bar is crowded- filled with men, women and everyone in between. She can almost feel the pressure around her shoulders, his arm claiming her. She’s not wearing enough- let Alicia talk her into barely there clothes and now she wants to wrap her arms around her body. 

A brunette smiles at her from across the bar and she wishes more than ever she hadn’t come. Tom never knew about this part of her. It would have given him even more reason to search her things. 

But the others are fast disappearing into the crowd and she wants to be alone even less. 

Her new colleague looks as uncomfortable as her, nursing the same drink she’s had for almost an hour, the pads of her fingers tapping against the glass. Sam looks for Bea and Alicia, but they’re lost somewhere in the heave of bodies. “It’s hot in here. Wanna go outside for a minute?” She has to tell over the music. 

It takes Ruby a moment to realise what she’s said, but the relief is obvious. She abandons her drink and Sam takes her hand as they fight through the crowd. 

~*~

Ruby’s still there in the morning. Sam had been too hazy with exhaustion and vodka to figure out a polite way to kick her out. And she hadn’t moaned about the light. It had been easy to fall asleep beside her. Easy again to make coffee around her, saying not more than “milk?” and handing her the sugar.

Even if Ruby almost drops the bowl when their hands touch. Obviously she’s not used to this. Sam’s not either- not anymore. She’s forgotten the lines, doesn’t know how to get rid of her. They have work soon anyway, might as well just drive in together. Iain won’t ask questions. They’re both women. 

When Ruby stammers that she doesn’t have any clothes, Sam rolls her eyes and tosses her some jeans and a t-shirt. Even lets her use the shower. It would almost be domestic if she didn’t keep a six foot distance between them. 

~*~

Dylan finds her as she’s heading off for a lunch break. “I saw the social worker last night.” He says it in the same way he says everything. 

“And?” she prompts.

“He said it’s extremely likely Sanosi will be able to stay here.” But there’s an edge to his voice, a tense muscle in his jaw. She opens her mouth to ask about it, but he’s already waking away. 

~*~

Alicia slides between her and Ruby when they’re chewing down sandwiches before the next emergency, muttering about Eddie and what an arrogant shit he is. Sam tells her he’s a man, he can’t help it. Iain, passing by, shoots her puppy eyes and clutches his heart. 

“He wants to go out tonight. Just to the pub.” But she scuffs the ground with her shoe. 

Sam swallows the last of her sandwich. “Let’s all go,” she says. 

Alarm flickers across Ruby’s face. Sam rolls her eyes, but looks away so Ruby doesn’t see. Maybe it’s best if she finds someone else to go home with tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not sure how many chapters left tbh. Might be one, might be two, might be more.   
> I hope the one person left out there that might still be reading enjoyed the chapter!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even want to look at how long this has taken, but here it is at last! I absolutely will finish this because Sam deserved so much better than what she got.

It’s been easier between them. Now that he knows she doesn’t have to try so hard to be who she was. She can just be. He understands when she just nods instead of arguing. He understands when her lines are forced, like they were written for her by someone who doesn’t understand who she is. He steps back and gives her space when he sees her eyes dart towards the door. With him she doesn’t have to play a part so she seeks him out more and more. He never even tries to touch her. 

~*~

Iain does. He throws his arm around her shoulders and looks wounded when she shrugs him off. They’ve always had an easy relationship- it’s what made him attractive when things were falling apart with Dylan, and they do now too, as long as she’s playing the part. He’s always been there. But they’ve fought wars together, how can she tell him she let a man like Tom crush her? That she begged him to love her when he treated her like a mould growth?

He already looks at her like she’s a baby bird trying to fly. They haven’t talked about it since he tried to confront her in the ambulance. She had shut the door on that, because they weren’t holding together the pieces of a nine year old girl with sand blinding them. He wasn’t holding her on a dusty bathroom floor while a cruel reminder that there was nothing left between her and Dylan bled between her legs. She wasn’t huddled in his bunk, shivering with pain and grief because her husband hadn’t picked up the phone when she had tried to tell him what they might have had. 

~*~

The pizza delivery man interrupts The Great British Bake Off. Dylan jumps up to answer the door like he doesn’t want to see how the three tier wedding cakes turn out. Sanosi uses the interruption to nick the corner seat so that when Dylan comes back with soggy pizza boxes, he stares at his stolen space for a moment before he settles in beside Sam. He gives her space but the muscles across her shoulders tighten. 

For a moment Tom’s suffocating arm enfolds around her, pinning her to his chest. She forces herself to breathe, to look at Dylan, stare until her mind catches up. Anger twists inwards, white hot and coiling around her bones. She’s pathetic. 

But when he turns to look back, her heart slows. He smiles stiffly. “All right?” he mutters out of the corner of his mouth. She nods, barely meeting his eyes, but her shoulders relax and when her hand brushes against his minutes later, she doesn’t move it. 

~*~

She hands over a patient and Dylan doesn’t look at her. At the very most she gets a sideways view. When she stands there without knowing what she’s waiting for, he snaps at the stretcher, but the words are for her. “Is that everything, Miss Nicholls?” 

Somehow, it’s the Miss that has the sharpest edges. In the last few weeks, she had almost forgotten what it felt like to be ‘Doctor’. She walks away without saying anything, feeling, at least, that this is finally something familiar. 

~*~

He corners her in the staffroom less than half an hour later when a year ago he would have frozen her out, only breaking his silence to snarl or snap at her. She turns away from the humming microwave to face him, meeting his gaze defiantly. 

“I just want to thank you,” he snaps, his voice laced with sarcasm. “You gave me some really wonderful advice.”

She frowns at him, struggling to recall their conversations. 

“I had a meeting with Sanosi’s social worker yesterday and they’re taking him away. Apparently a single alcoholic with a job as demanding as mine cannot be trusted with a vulnerable nine year old.”

Her heart drops into her stomach. “Dylan-”

“No, you’ve always been the same. You have to swoop in and fix everything, save everyone always thinking that you know best.”

“They haven’t sent him back?”

Dylan glares at her like she shouldn’t have the audacity to be concerned. “No, they haven’t, but that’s hardly the point, is it? After the series of uttar catastrophes your life has been you really should have learned not to go interfering in others’ anymore, but obviously you haven’t.”

“What was your plan?” she snaps back, feeling a fire flicker to life inside her. “Keep him hidden on the boat for the rest of his life? Never let him go outside, go to school?”

“All I know Samantha is we were doing absolutely fine before you butted in. I don’t care what you do with your own life or anyone else’s, but you’re to stay out of mine.” 

He’s gone before she can begin to argue. The microwave beeps incessantly, like it’s angry with her too. 

~*~

Ruby looks at her shoulder and asks if she wants to go to the pub at the end of their shift. Bea and Alicia too- she adds quickly. Sam nods without taking it in. Her mind is on Dylan. She needs taking out of it, or the haze of alcohol. Either way it beats being in her empty flat with only her own thoughts. 

They end up in the same one she proposed to Tom in. It feels like so long ago, like she’s aged so much in between that her bones creak when she moves, like they might even turn to dust if someone holds her too hard. She orders a gin and tonic, light on the tonic.

The bar is spinning pleasantly by her sixth. More than once she catches Bea looking at her, but Ruby was enough to teach her not to have one night stands with her colleagues. Or have affairs. Or marry them. Her list of mistakes is endless and she isn’t going to add another, no matter how badly she wants to forget that she almost trusted him again. Another gin and tonic will have to be enough. 

Barely half an hour later, it is. She’s laughing as she listens to Alicia and Bea argue about dishes being left in the sink vs the side. The kind of ridiculous argument only people who live together can have. It’s better than thinking about the argument she had with her ex-husband. (Better than thinking about how Sanosi is gone and it’s all her fault). 

When they stumble out of the pub maybe an hour after that, Bea is hanging onto Alicia and she feels Ruby’s arm slip through hers. It helps to have someone there when she trips over the pavement. 

As they get nearer to Sam’s flat, she tugs Ruby closer, sliding her arm around her waist. But when she leans into her, Ruby presses her palm against her chest. “We can’t. You’ve had almost four times the amount to drink than I have and that makes this an unfair exchange of consent.” 

Sam rolls her eyes. “Thank-you for the PSHE lesson.” She tries to pull Ruby back and stumbles, her shoulders grazing the wall behind her. Ruby takes her arm and tugs her gently along the pavement, frowning slightly now. 

Inside her, something is twisting and burning. She wants, needs, to get away from Ruby, slam her door on everyone and…nothing. She wants to be no one. Blink out of existence, because there’s nothing left worth fighting for. She’s got two failed marriages. She’s not a doctor anymore, the army won’t have her. No family. She untangles herself from Ruby and scrambles with her keys. 

“Are you all right?” Even though she can’t see her, she know Ruby will be leaning on each foot in turn like she does when she’s nervous. 

“I’m fine,” Sam deadpans at the door. It creaks open. “Goodnight. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She shuts it before Ruby can say anything else. 

Inside, Sam shrugs off her coat and sinks onto the sofa. She doesn’t want to be here. 

~*~

The sterile bandages in the back of the ambulance need replacing so Sam has climbed in to do it when Iain follows her, shutting the doors behind them. “What are you doing?” she demands a lot more sharply than she needs too. (Tom is following her into the bar toilets, bolting the cubicle door behind them, gazing at her with specks of coal in his eyes). 

Iain sits down. “We’re gonna talk.” He’s calm, soft, even, but there’s no room for argument. He’s wearing the same expression he wore when he held her back from going into a building that had just exploded, saving her from the second bomb that tore the fragments apart minutes later. 

Sam’s fist curls around the pack of bandages she’s holding. 

“What’s up? And don’t tell me nothing. Ever since you came back you’ve not been yourself. Ruby found you in the bay that time and these last few weeks you’ve barely even said a word to either of us.”

Anger coils in her gut but she can’t attach it to anything. Iain isn’t accusing her. He’s not sulking and giving her the cold shoulder because she chose to go paintballing with her colleagues rather than sit in and watch a film with him. 

“Look Sam, the things we’ve seen...Even after all this time it still wakes me up in the middle of the night.” 

The bandages are crushed so tightly that her nails are digging into the palm of her hand. “It’s not that.” She woke up choking on her own scream and Tom had dragged the duvet away and stormed into the spare room. She still didn’t dare to sleep with the light on. 

“Then what is it? Come on, Sam, it’s me.”

Iain, who held her hand when she had to swallow a pill so bits of her could-have-been child didn’t get stuck in her womb and snuck her blood soaked clothes into the laundrette so no one else would see. 

“I didn’t cheat on Tom.” Now she doesn’t have a lie to hide behind. “He...we weren’t happy. He was controlling, possessive. At first I thought he changed, but he was always like that. I just didn’t want to see it.” She tosses the bandages aside suddenly, her face set. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s done, I left him.” After catching him in their bed with someone else. 

“Did you at least fill his shoes with cold mashed potato before you went?” 

Sam looks at him at last with almost a smile. “I’m not six, so no. I did hide a dead fish in the shower vent though.” 

“Much more mature.” He grabs her hand and pulls her into a quick one armed hug before the radio crackles to life between them. 

~*~

There’s been an accident. A motorway pile up with one of their own ambulances involved. Iain, Ruby- her friends. She’s bundling into an ambulance with Dylan jumping into the passenger seat and she quips about it being just like old times, but it falls flat because it’s not like old times at all. Then she had doctor’s coat too. 

“Oh yes, spending time with my ex wife and the man she had an affair with I can hardly wait.” It’s the most he’s said to her in weeks. 

~*~

She’s running, the heat licking like flames against her back, she can feel it through her suit, through her skin and she feels the explosion right through to her bones. 

~*~

Dylan’s at her side in a moment- or has it been longer?- dragging her to her feet and pulling her away from the wreckage. They each take one side of the stretcher. Her head is spinning and he looks at her like she’s an old woman walking a tightrope. 

They bundle the patient into the back of the ambulance and it’s all going through the motions from there. One of the other paramedics drives, not Jan, Iain or Ruby - one she doesn’t know. The ambulance lurges all over the road, or at least she thinks it does until she sweeps a strand of fallen hair from her face and her fingers come back red. 

“Sam?” Dylan reaches for her, but she brushes him away, her attention already back on their patient. “You’re getting checked out when we get back,” he says. She doesn’t bother to argue. 

~*~

A searing pain burns like acid under her skin. When she puts her hand to it, her side is slick and wet with blood. The desk she’s leaning on lurches away from her and she stumbles, arm wrapped around her waist. She staggers to the door at the same time as she gropes for her phone. When she swipes to unlock it her thumb leaves a streak of blood behind. It’s trembling by the time she finds Dylan’s number and it falls from her hand as soon as she’s pressed call. She reaches for it and her legs give. Her weight lands on her elbow, but she doesn’t feel the pain of it, or of her head coming next and bouncing from the concreted floor. 

Her fingers crawl towards her phone. She hears someone on the other end of it that isn’t Dylan. It’s cold in her hand, against her ear. She chokes his name. The person on the other end that isn’t Dylan says: “Sam, are you okay?” She can’t say anything else. The station is fading around her, all of it swirling into black and she’s scared. More terrified than she’s ever been in her life of the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed my mind, this is going to be six chapters so one more to go.


End file.
